Iconoclast To The End: Smashing Windows For Fun And Prophet

Correction, he said:
"So an OS is a stack of metaphors and abstractions that stands between you and the telegrams, and embodying various tricks the programmer used to convert the information you're working with--be it images, e-mail messages, movies, or word processing documents--into the necklaces of bytes that are the only things computers know how to work with. When we used actual telegraph equipment (teletypes) or their higher-tech substitutes ("glass teletypes," or the MS-DOS command line) to work with our computers, we were very close to the bottom of that stack. When we use most modern operating systems, though, our interaction with the machine is heavily mediated. Everything we do is interpreted and translated time and again as it works its way down through all of the metaphors and abstractions."
Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line

Windows has been successful because it appears easy to use. Anyone who works with this OS day to day has learnt all the little aggravating idiosyncracies.
Some of us make a good living picking up the pieces when Windows decides to throw a fit and bluescreen.

Ha - Neal Stephenson said that windows were a metaphor... but then so are command line instructions.......

Computers *really* communicate in electric fields... if you arre not going to speak that 'language' yourself... you need some kind of metaphor to communicate with the computer - windows is an attempt to make that metaphor more human like than computer like.......

You can hardly argue that it's a mistake to mould the computer itnerface to *our* convenience rather than mould our thinking to the 'machines' convenience.

Neal actually says that Microsoft as a corporation is a reasonable response to the *economic* situation of the computer industry - which all they have ever sought to be. People who have a problem with them... largely have a problem purely because they've been so successful. They've largely been successful - because their programs are easy to use.